A job where worlds collide

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and its newly appointed director are about the same age. LACMA turns 41 this year, while Michael Govan, who on Thursday was named the sixth person to lead the Wilshire Boulevard museum, is 42. They’ve both matured during a tumultuous and often confusing museum era, which might make the appointment a seamless fit.

Both came into the world in the 1960s, when the historic relationship between art and American life was undergoing the most dramatic change in the nation’s history. Put most simply: Before then there was no relationship between them, except in the most narrow, limited and largely inconsequential way. Since then the entanglement has become dense and complex.

It is an oversimplification -- but not by much -- to describe the still relatively young cultural economy in the United States as a major product of the Cold War. The effort to assert the superiority of American society over Soviet meant supplying it with the most powerful symbolic trappings of civilization. That meant art.

In 1965, when LACMA opened on Wilshire at the far edge of the Miracle Mile, art was finally separated out from the old county museum structure, where it had gone hand in hand with history and science. Now art stood on its own.

Equally important, LACMA occupied an architectural edifice whose form spoke volumes. Stylistically the building mimicked the Modernist Classicism of Manhattan’s shiny new performing arts venue, Lincoln Center -- another sleek yet decorated culture palace set atop a podium, standing in grand isolation above the street.

LACMA was designed to house a sprawling, encyclopedic art collection representing every historical era and every global nook and cranny, including Old Master paintings from Europe, pre-Columbian textiles from South America, bronze sculptures from India and much more. Its trustees even officially characterized their ambition as becoming a West Coast equivalent to the mightiest encyclopedic museum of them all, the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- without, notably, keeping the Met’s old-fashioned Beaux-Arts-style building in the bargain. That they left in Exposition Park.

The new LACMA embodied a conspicuous tension, which has defined its split personality ever since. The past was packaged as the future. Tradition was clad in novelty. Yesterday was all done up in tomorrow. And now, as a new director prepares to arrive at his office in March, LACMA’s latest twist on that tension is moving into overdrive.

The Broad Contemporary Art Museum, built with a $50-million gift from financier, art collector and LACMA trustee Eli Broad, has broken ground in Hancock Park between LACMA West and the Ahmanson Building, with completion targeted for next year. The project, already nicknamed B-CAM, has raised eyebrows.

Broad is paying for the new building, whose architect he also chose, but LACMA will assume the operating costs. A famously controlling personality, he has not pledged to the museum any art from either his stellar personal collection or his sprawling foundation collection; he is also directing the expenditure of a separate $10-million gift to buy contemporary art. An independent board of trustees led by Broad will govern B-CAM in a manner that remains unclear, even as the building’s basement is being dug.

Since the resignation last spring of director Andrea Rich, the project’s discomfiting separate-but-equal structure is a chief reason that “no thanks” was the response of numerous candidates approached for LACMA’s top post. (Michael Brand, who arrived last month from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as the Getty Museum’s new director, was also on the search committee’s list.) It’s hard to blame them for their caution.

If you think about it, B-CAM -- whatever the obvious and considerable potential of the place -- is organized in a manner that expresses a surprising lack of confidence in LACMA, the mother ship. That appearance is exceedingly odd -- and odder still coming from an important, influential LACMA trustee.

So Govan will have his work cut out for him. Although details of his compensation package were not announced, sources say that LACMA’s 11-member search committee decided late last fall to deal with candidates’ understandable hesitancy by making the job among the most lucrative museum directorships in the nation. In other words, they would make an offer that couldn’t be refused.

That decision is one measure of the board’s financial clout. Govan will need to harness it for the museum. (LACMA’s $125-million operating endowment is sorely underfunded, and raising its level is a priority of board chair Nancy Daly Riordan.) He did that successfully at the Dia Art Foundation, where a $50-million renovation of an old factory in the small upstate town of Beacon, N.Y., resulted in a smashing venue for a collection focused on American and European art of the 1960s, 1970s and after.

Los Angeles artist Robert Irwin guided Dia:Beacon’s renovation design, a practice typical of the foundation’s commitment to working with living artists. Govan and his staff had responsibility for about 30 artists’ projects during his 11-year tenure as director, including an extraordinary lobby installation by another gifted L.A. artist, Jorge Pardo. An artist-centric museum director will be a LACMA first.

Notably, that may further maximize a development in our national art life that has shaped up in the last decade and more. Los Angeles has emerged as America’s most interesting and exciting production center for new art. Meanwhile, New York has consolidated its position as art’s primary consumption center. What this dichotomy means for art museums is significant.

In museum terms, production and consumption translate most visibly into styles of exhibition programming. New York’s museums are ruled by patterns of consumption. Because of it, their contemporary art programming is a shambles -- mostly safe, conservative, star-driven, geared toward cultural tourists, oriented toward the bottom line. It’s the art equivalent of popular entertainment, with the museum as Hollywood movie studio.

By contrast the most consistently vivifying contemporary art programming will be found in L.A., at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the UCLA Hammer Museum, which reflects the city’s prominence as a production center. The landmark “Masters of American Comics,” the sprawling and in-your-face “Ecstasy: In and About Altered States,” and the small, ruminative survey of international work by younger artists, “Painting in Tongues” -- all currently at MOCA and the Hammer -- are typical. It is hard to imagine these shows and others like them being organized on a regular basis anywhere else today.

So the prospect of a third major contemporary program at LACMA is tantalizing. Certainly it’s a principal reason the search committee went after Govan.

Yet the historic tensions of tradition clad as novelty that have riven LACMA for four decades are still at play, and they should not be ignored. Consumption was the force driving last year’s decision to turn over its galleries to a for-profit entertainment conglomerate for the cheesy King Tut exhibition -- an embarrassment no other prominent American art museum was willing to countenance.

With the construction of B-CAM, LACMA is now positioning itself as the only major encyclopedic art museum in the United States to make a full commitment to contemporary art. Hiring Govan as director puts that pledge in the foreground, if only because his professional experience is limited almost entirely to the art of the last 50 years.

To make it work, though, will require equally serious innovation in the other side of the equation -- namely, in LACMA’s stature as an encyclopedic museum. The quality of its diverse collections is far better than is usually acknowledged. But because the museum has been without effective artistic leadership since the departure of Earl A. Powell III in 1992 -- an extraordinarily long time -- the depth and breadth of those collections might be the museum’s best-kept secret.

What is not a secret is that the curatorial structure outside the contemporary field -- which is to say, most of LACMA’s staff -- is worried. The emphasis on B-CAM could come at the expense of other art worlds, and it will make considerable demands on the new director. The overtures Govan makes in their direction will be critical.

Like B-CAM, Dia:Beacon was largely underwritten by a single enthusiastic donor -- Leonard Riggio, chairman of Barnes & Noble Inc. -- so Govan is not without considerable experience in that regard. Whether and how he will also harness LACMA’s encyclopedic strength, making it live as vividly as a program attentive to the art of our time, will be the ultimate test of his tenure.